Friday, December 21, 2012

We are at the halfway point of the Google Code-in 2012 contest and we wanted to share some exciting stats with you. The contest is designed to introduce 13-17 year old pre-university students to the world of open source software development. During the first few weeks we have had 297 students complete at least one task in the contest. For many students this is their first introduction to the open source community.

Along with striving for certificates and t-shirts, many students are working toward the grand prize trip to Google’s Mountain View, California Campus for 20 hard working contestants next spring.

Google Code-in 2012 by the numbers

Registered Students

Currently over 1900 students from 81 countries have registered for the contest.

There are two new countries to add to the list this year- United Arab Emirates and Zimbabwe

The countries with the most registered students are (in order):

United States 877

India 208

Canada 92

Bulgaria 81

United Kingdom 72

Romania 68

Australia 35

Poland 29

South Korea 29

Spain 29

Students who have already completed tasks

We are excited to announce we have students completing tasks for the first time from the following countries: China, Kenya (6 students so far), Kuwait, Peru, Trinidad and Tobago, and Uruguay

For the following countries the student participation in 2012 has already at least doubled from earlier years: Argentina, Australia, Ireland, Singapore, and South Korea.

Today, a 34-year-old K-Pop artist made online video history when his viral video, Gangnam Style, smashed our records and became the first video ever to reach one billion views. Yup, that’s right one BILLION views!

PSY's success is a great testament to the universal appeal of catchy music-- and er, great equine dance moves. In the past, music distribution was mostly regional. It was more difficult to learn about great artists from around the world. But with a global platform at their fingertips, people are now discovering and sharing amazing music from all over the planet, by artists like Brazilian Michel Teló and Belgian-Australian Gotye.

One billion views is an incredible number, but the PSY-nomenon goes beyond that. Check out these stats:

PSY was already big in Korea, but in 2012, he became a global celeb as Gangnam Style quickly spread from Seoul and the pacific to North America, South America, and Europe. It’s been seen at least 1 million times in close to 75 countries, making it one of the most global music sensations ever!

From a one-thousand person flash mob in Jakarta to cover videos from Ai Weiwei and Mitt Romney, hundreds of thousands of parodies have been uploaded to YouTube, some of which have tens of millions of views. In fact, fan tributes to Gangnam Style are now being viewed 20 million times every single day.

"Gangnam Style" was YouTube's top rising search of 2012 and on October 6th, we saw more than five million searches for “gangnam style” in a single day. Check out this video demonstrating some of our most popular YouTube searches this year.

For those interested in the business side: a number of assessments and projections have been posted claiming “Gangnam Style” has generated over $8.1 million in advertising deals, hit more than 2.9 million in song downloads since July, and achieved other incredible feats!

Perhaps what’s most impressive about this feat is that it took just over five months to happen. To give this milestone some context, here’s a chart of Gangnam Style’s rise to popularity versus Justin Bieber’s “Baby,” the video that previously held the most-watched video title:

Congratulations to PSY, the flash mobbers, K-Pop fans and people who love fun across the globe. Considering the Gangnam Style dance was the number one dance-related search on YouTube this year, you better make sure you brush up on your moves before New Year's Eve.

The kind of amazing creativity and unique connection between people all over the world that resulted in this one billion views is only possible with an incredible community of people we're so lucky to have on YouTube. And we can't wait to see what you'll come up with next!

Thursday, December 20, 2012

Ten years ago, business technology was at the forefront of innovation and productivity. But there’s a fundamental shift underway: in the last few years, consumer technology has begun to outpace business technology. People have fallen in love with the simplicity and freedom of living in the cloud with the help of modern browsers and smartphones—and they want to bring that experience to the workplace.

This is where Google comes in. For the better part of the past decade, we’ve worked to extend our popular consumer products—everything from Gmail and Google Drive to Maps, Google+ and Search—to meet your business needs. It should be easy for you to work better together, from anywhere, with secure (and simple!) tools. Here’s a look back at some key highlights from 2012.

Work securely...Keeping your information secure is one of our top priorities. To that end, domain administrators can now require their employees to use 2-step verification, an additional layer of security that reduces the chance of unauthorized account access. Your company can also use Google Apps Vault, a solution for managing and archiving critical information for legal and regulatory reasons. If your business operates outside the U.S., we now offer Model Contract Clauses as an additional way to comply with the European Commission’s Data Protection Directive. Finally, Google Apps received ISO 27001 certification, ensuring our systems meet one of the most widely, internationally accepted independent security standards.

… anytime, anywhere...It should be easy to get work done – anytime, on any device, with anyone. With offline editing in Chrome, you can now create and edit Google documents and leave comments even when you don’t have an Internet connection. Any changes you make will be automatically synced when you get back online. When you’re travelling, you can also edit Google documents and spreadsheets using the Drive app on your iPhone, iPad or Android device. Just like on your computer, you’ll be able to see other people’s edits instantly as they’re made.

...with simple tools...We’ve also focused on making our products simpler and easier for you to use – both at home and at work. We introduced Google Drive as a single place for you to create, share, collaborate and keep all your work. You can now insert files (up to 10GB) from Drive directly into an email without leaving your Gmail inbox, and you can share work from Drive on Google+. You and up to 14 colleagues can join a Google+ hangout directly from a calendar entry or your email inbox. Once inside a hangout, you can open a Google Doc for everyone to see and work on simultaneously. And if your company uses Chrome along with Google Apps, you can now call or email us for help with Chrome.

With the Google Search Appliance 7.0, you can search for a document on your company’s intranet just as easily as you’d search for a holiday recipe on Google.com. And if your business relies on geographic data—say, to map gas pipelines or help customers locate your store—you can use Google Maps and Earth Enterprise to visualize your data on the Google Maps interface you’re already familiar with.

...supported by partners and Google infrastructureWhether it’s Apps for Business, Maps Coordinate, or just a Google search, most Google services you use are possible only because of the powerful and energy-efficient infrastructure we’ve built over the years. This year, we worked to bring you more direct access to this infrastructure to help run your businesses and applications in the cloud. Compute Engine lets your business run virtual machines in Google’s data centers and BigQuery helps you quickly analyze big sets of data to gain business insights. Google Cloud Platform also offers more European datacenter support and lower prices for Cloud Storage.

We hope you’ve had a chance to try the new Google Maps app for iPhone (announced last week and available for download in the Apple App Store). The app is designed to be simple—just to work whenever you need it. Still, we have a few tips to make finding things with Google Maps even faster and easier. All the tips are collected on our site but here a few of my favorites:

Swipe to see more. In Google Maps a wealth of information is often just a swipe away. Whether you’re looking at search results or directions, you can swipe the bottom info sheet left and right to see other options. To get more details on any of the results, swipe that info sheet upward (or just tap it—that works too). Even with the info sheet expanded, you can swipe to see those other results.

Place a pin. Get more information about any location by just pressing and holding the map. The info sheet that pops up tells you the address, lets you save or share the place, and best of all, brings up...

Street View. By far the easiest way to get to Street View is placing a pin. Tap the imagery preview on the info sheet to enter into Street View, then explore! I recommend the look-around feature (bottom left button) which changes what you’re looking at as you tilt and move your phone.

Want to learn more? See the rest of our tips on the site. And as you explore the app on your own, share your own tips using #googlemaps. Most of all, enjoy discovering your world.

In 2007, 33-year-old Vuyile moved to Cape Town from rural South Africa in search of work. Unable to complete high school, he worked as a night shift security guard earning $500/month to support his family. During the rush hour commute from his home in Khayelitsha, Vuyile realized that he could earn extra income by selling prepaid mobile airtime vouchers to other commuters on the train.

In rural areas, it’s common to use prepaid vouchers to pay for basic services such as electricity, insurance and airtime for mobile phones. But it’s often difficult to distribute physical vouchers because of the risk of theft and fraud.

Nomanini, a startup based in South Africa, built a device that enables local entrepreneurs like Vuyile to sell prepaid mobile services in their communities. The Lula (which means “easy” in colloquial Zulu), is a portable voucher sales terminal that is used on-the-go by people ranging from taxi drivers to street vendors. It generates and prints codes which people purchase to add minutes to their mobile phones.

Today, Vuyile sells vouchers on the train for cash payment, and earns a commission weekly. Since he started using the Lula, he’s seen his monthly income increase by 20 percent.

Vuyile prints a voucher from his Lula

Nomanini founders Vahid and Ali Monadjem wanted to make mobile services widely available in areas where they had been inaccessible, or where—in a region where the average person makes less than $200/month—people simply couldn’t afford them. By creating a low-cost and easy-to-use product, Nomanini could enable entrepreneurs in Africa to go to deep rural areas and create businesses for themselves.

In order to build a scalable and reliable backend system to keep the Lula running, Nomanini chose to run on Google App Engine. Their development team doesn’t have to spend time setting up their own servers and can instead run on the same infrastructure that powers Google’s own applications. They can focus on building their backend systems and easily deploy code to Google’s data centers. When Vuyile makes a sale, he presses a few buttons, App Engine processes the request, and the voucher prints in seconds.

Last month, 40,000 people bought airtime through the Lula, and Nomanini hopes to grow this number to 1 million per month next year. While platforms like App Engine are typically used to build web or smartphone apps, entrepreneurs like Vahid and Ali are finding innovative ways to leverage this technology by building their own devices and connecting them to App Engine. Vahid tells us: “We’re a uniquely born and bred African solution, and we have great potential to take this to the rest of Africa and wider emerging markets. We could not easily scale this fast without running on Google App Engine.”

To learn more about the technical implementation used by Nomanini, read their guest post on the Google App Engine blog.

We hope you’ve had a chance to try the new Google Maps app for iPhone (announced last week and available for download in the Apple App Store). The app is designed to be simple—just to work whenever you need it. Still, we have a few tips to make finding things with Google Maps even faster and easier. All the tips are collected on our site but here a few of my favorites:

Swipe to see more. In Google Maps a wealth of information is often just a swipe away. Whether you’re looking at search results or directions, you can swipe the bottom info sheet left and right to see other options. To get more details on any of the results, swipe that info sheet upward (or just tap it—that works too). Even with the info sheet expanded, you can swipe to see those other results.

Place a pin. Get more information about any location by just pressing and holding the map. The info sheet that pops up tells you the address, lets you save or share the place, and best of all, brings up...

Street View. By far the easiest way to get to Street View is placing a pin. Tap the imagery preview on the info sheet to enter into Street View, then explore! I recommend the look-around feature (bottom left button) which changes what you’re looking at as you tilt and move your phone.

Want to learn more? See the rest of our tips on the site. And as you explore the app on your own, share your own tips using #googlemaps. Most of all, enjoy discovering your world.

In 2007, 33-year-old Vuyile moved to Cape Town from rural South Africa in search of work. Unable to complete high school, he worked as a night shift security guard earning $500/month to support his family. During the rush hour commute from his home in Khayelitsha, Vuyile realized that he could earn extra income by selling prepaid mobile airtime vouchers to other commuters on the train.

In rural areas, it’s common to use prepaid vouchers to pay for basic services such as electricity, insurance and airtime for mobile phones. But it’s often difficult to distribute physical vouchers because of the risk of theft and fraud.

Nomanini, a startup based in South Africa, built a device that enables local entrepreneurs like Vuyile to sell prepaid mobile services in their communities. The Lula (which means “easy” in colloquial Zulu), is a portable voucher sales terminal that is used on-the-go by people ranging from taxi drivers to street vendors. It generates and prints codes which people purchase to add minutes to their mobile phones.

Today, Vuyile sells vouchers on the train for cash payment, and earns a commission weekly. Since he started using the Lula, he’s seen his monthly income increase by 20 percent.

Vuyile prints a voucher from his Lula

Nomanini founders Vahid and Ali Monadjem wanted to make mobile services widely available in areas where they had been inaccessible, or where—in a region where the average person makes less than $200/month—people simply couldn’t afford them. By creating a low-cost and easy-to-use product, Nomanini could enable entrepreneurs in Africa to go to deep rural areas and create businesses for themselves.

In order to build a scalable and reliable backend system to keep the Lula running, Nomanini chose to run on Google App Engine. Their development team doesn’t have to spend time setting up their own servers and can instead run on the same infrastructure that powers Google’s own applications. They can focus on building their backend systems and easily deploy code to Google’s data centers. When Vuyile makes a sale, he presses a few buttons, App Engine processes the request, and the voucher prints in seconds.

Last month, 40,000 people bought airtime through the Lula, and Nomanini hopes to grow this number to 1 million per month next year. While platforms like App Engine are typically used to build web or smartphone apps, entrepreneurs like Vahid and Ali are finding innovative ways to leverage this technology by building their own devices and connecting them to App Engine. Vahid tells us: “We’re a uniquely born and bred African solution, and we have great potential to take this to the rest of Africa and wider emerging markets. We could not easily scale this fast without running on Google App Engine.”

To learn more about the technical implementation used by Nomanini, read their guest post on the Google App Engine blog.

Editors note: Today's guest blogger is Jeff Son, Strategy Manager at YG Entertainment, a record label and talent agency based in Seoul, South Korea.

YG Entertainment is a record label and talent agency based in Seoul, South Korea, specializing in R&B and hip hop music. We represent some of the biggest names in Korean music including BIGBANG, 2NE1, Lee Hi — and of course, rapper PSY, whose “Gangnam Style” recently became the most popular YouTube video of all time.

Over the last few years, we have been working hard to bring the best of K-Pop to the world. In the last two weeks alone, PSY has been busy touring the United States, 2NE1 have been touring South East Asia, and Big Bang has been touring Japan.

With artists all over the world and a third of our staff out of the country all the time, we need a communication system we can rely on. Prior to moving to Google Apps, our email system was run from a local Korean server. This was fine while we were in Korea, but was unreliable when working internationally. When looking for alternatives, we wanted mobility, speed and stability for teams and artists on the go. As a creative business using both Macintosh and Windows, we also wanted something which would be compatible with both operating systems.

Google Apps worked well with all these requirements. Since making the switch to Gmail in June this year we’ve noticed a big increase in email reliability. We’ve also found the mobile experience is much better. Staff use smartphones and tablets to access Gmail and Calendar and find it much more intuitive than our previous system. We also like that Google Apps is priced according to the number of accounts, not the amount of storage that you use, so we only pay for what we use.

As we continue to expand globally, nurturing Korean talent and bring stars like PSY onto the world stage, we’re confident knowing that Google Apps can scale with us.

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

You can now discover Spain’s Jewish heritage on a new site powered by comprehensive and accurate Google Maps: www.redjuderias.org/google.

Using the Google Maps API, Red de Juderías de España has built a site where you can explore more than 500 landmarks that shed light on Spain’s Jewish population throughout history. By clicking on a landmark, you can get historical information, pictures or texts, and a 360º view of the location, thanks to Street View technology. You can also use the search panel on the top of the page to filter the locations by category, type, geographic zone or date.

Toledo, Synagogue Santamaría la Blanca

Information is included on each landmark

This project is just one of our efforts to bring important cultural content online. This week, we worked with the Israel Antiquities Authority to launch the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library, an online collection of more than 5,000 scroll fragments, and last year we announced a project to digitize and make available the Yad Vashem Museum’s Holocaust archives. With the Google Art Project, people around the world can also view and explore more than 35,000 works of art in 180 museums.

Read more about this project on the Europe Blog. We hope this new site will inspire you to learn more about Spain’s Jewish history, and perhaps to visit these cities in person.

Posted by William Echikson, External Relations, Europe, Middle East and Africa

Since the Quickoffice team joined Google a few months ago, we’ve been working to make it easier for you to work with your legacy Microsoft Office files -- both by converting them to Google documents and by editing them directly in Quickoffice.

Using Quickoffice to edit Office files on your iPadConverting old files to Google Docs, Sheets and Slides is the easiest way to share and work together, but perhaps not everyone you work with has gone Google yet. To complement what you can do with Google documents, we’re also making it easier for you to make quick edits to Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint files without conversion. Starting today, the Quickoffice iPad app is available for free to all Apps for Business customers, and iPhone and Android versions are on the way. With the app, you can open and edit any Office files you’ve stored in Google Drive right from your iPad.

Whether you’re converting Office files to Google documents or you just need to make a couple quick edits without converting, it should be easy to get work done whenever you need to, on any device. Stay tuned for more document conversion and mobile editing improvements in 2013.

2012 was quite eventful for theAdWords Top Contributors. The year started with moving to thenew home for the Community, which became the online meeting place for small business owners and online marketing professionals. AdWords Top Contributors helped tens of thousands of businesses find ways to get the best results from AdWords and provided the Community with exclusive tips and tricks. In October 2012, some AdWords Top Contributors visited the Googleplex in California for theAdWords Communities Summit. During this two-day event, they had a chance to meet with AdWords support and product management teams, to learn from each other, and to provide feedback to Google’s teams.We want to thank Top Contributors for their dedicated participation in the AdWords Community and for being the true advocates of online advertising. Our annual tradition is to recognize the most outstanding “above and beyond” efforts with the annual Top Contributors badge. The 2012 recipients for the annual AdWords Top Contributor badge (English) have just been announced! Drum-roll, and congratulations to:

In addition to the listed Top Contributors from the English Community, the badge was also granted to 25 other Top Contributors from our international AdWords Communities inFrench,German,Italian,Polish,Portuguese,Russian andSpanish languages.Congratulations! It’s time to enjoy the holidays, and look forward to a new exciting journey of 2013!*Kim Clickunbroomer is now a Top Contributors alumni, but her contribution this year was and still is remarkable.

Last Wednesday we held a webinar on Remarketing with Google Analytics. We launched this feature earlier this year to help you reconnect with your site visitors in relevant ways. Remarketing with Google Analytics lets you show ads to website visitors who have shown an interest in your site as they browse other sites on the Google Display Network (GDN). So you can reach the right audience with the right message at the right time.

Watch the webinar video here to learn more about:

The overall benefits of Remarketing with Google Analytics

See a live demo of the product

Understand how to set this up for your business

And see some key examples of what’s possible

Read on for responses to some of the top questions we received during the webinar:

Any quick tips for getting started?Yes, our help center includes a great guide with everything you need to know to get started.

Is there a limit on the number of lists that you can create in your Google Analytics account?No! We want to encourage you to create as many lists as you need to run an effective remarketing campaign.

How should I set “membership duration” for my lists?The default membership duration is 30 days, but we recommend choosing a duration related to the length of time you expect your ad to be relevant to the user. Learn more about membership duration in this article in the AdWords Help Center.

How can remarketing lists in Google Analytics be edited or deleted?It’s easy to edit existing lists by clicking on the name of the list in the main table. Visitors who have already been added to the list will be removed from the list when the list duration for those visitors expires.

Both AdWords and Analytics save lists for historical campaign reporting purposes, so it’s not currently possible to delete lists -- but often you can simply edit your old lists so they continue to be useful. That said, we are looking into ways to provide better controls for managing lists that are no longer in use such as providing ways to hide or archive old or unused lists.

Can you use Google Tag Manager with Remarketing with Google Analytics?Yes! Google Tag Manager fully supports Remarketing with Google Analytics. When you are setting up your “Google Analytics” tag templates in the Google Tag Manager User Interface, you can choose to enable the “Add Display Advertiser Support” check box-- this will make all the tagging changes necessary to use Remarketing with Google Analytics.

Can you share lists between Google Analytics profiles? What about across different AdWords accounts?When you create a remarketing list in Google Analytics, you must choose to base it off of a single, specific Profile (a Google Analytics Profile determines which data from your site appears in the reports; it may, for example, include filters to eliminate traffic from internal users). If you want to create a list that’s based off of two profiles, you must create that list twice -- once for each Profile. Similarly for AdWords accounts, if you want to share a list with more than one account, you must create the list once for each account you want to share it with.

Do you have examples of remarketing lists I might consider creating with Google Analytics?Yes, you can find some examples in the webinar video and in on our product fact sheet, and we’re working on providing more examples and tips. Stay tuned!

We hope you found this webinar useful -- and that you go start creating your first remarketing lists using Google Analytics now.

At Google, we’re always excited to see how educators around the world use technology to transform teaching practices and models. In Latin America, for example, thousands of schools and universities have already adopted Google Apps for Education to teach and collaborate in the cloud.

One such university in Latin America is Universidad Austral, a higher education institution in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In 2007, the University’s Law School migrated to Google Apps for Education so students could access course materials anytime and anywhere, whether in class, in the library or at home. Faculty members use Google Drive to distribute lesson materials and Google Calendar to keep students informed about any changes in the location, time and agenda of lectures. Also, all Law Degree students receive a tablet configured with their Google Apps account and syllabus, which reduces the use of photocopies, provides a digital repository of reference materials, enables mobility and encourages class participation during case study discussions.

After the Law School's positive experience with Google Apps for Education, the Education School at Universidad Austral also decided to go Google. Since migrating in 2011, the Education School has been using Google Sites to build course portals, which house lesson plans, resources, class calendars, videos and presentations. These course portals serve as virtual learning environments, which educators tailor with resources of the Web 2.0, like interactive gadgets embedded in Google Sites.

But Universidad Austral is just one example of how schools in Latin America are using Google Apps for Education. Servicio Nacional de Aprendizaje (SENA) and Corporación Unificada Nacional (CUN) in Colombia, Instituto Lux in Mexico, and Universidade Federal de Pernambuco in Brazil also use Google Apps to integrate technology into the classroom.

We're inspired by educators around the world who are reinventing the way we teach and learn with the use of technology. This motivates us even more to continue working on our products to help educational institutions shape the future of education. Learn more about Google Apps for Education.

Posted by Vahab Mirrokni, Research Scientist, Google Research New York

Google regularly participates in the WINE conference: Workshop on Internet & Network Economics. WINE’12 just happened last week in Liverpool, UK, where there is a strong economics and computation group. WINE provides a forum for researchers across various disciplines to examine interesting algorithmic and economic problems of mutual interest that have emerged from the Internet over the past decade. For Google, the exchange of ideas at this selective workshop has resulted in innovation and improvements in algorithms and economic auctions, such as our display ad allocation.

Googlers co-authored three papers this year; here’s a synopsis of each, as well as some highlights from invited talks at the conference:

Budget Optimization for Online Campaigns with Positive Carryover EffectsThis paper first argues that ad impressions may have some long-term impact on user behaviour, and refers to an older WWW ’10 paper. Based on this motivation, the paper presents a scalable budget optimization algorithm for online advertising campaigns in the presence of Markov user behavior. In such settings, showing an ad to a user may change their actions in the future through a Markov model, and the probability of conversion for the ad does not only depend on the last ad shown, but also on earlier user activities. The main purpose of the paper is to give a simpler algorithm to solve a constrained Markov Decision Process, and confirms this easier solution via simulations on some advertising data sets. The paper was written when Nikolay Archak, a PhD student at NYU business school, was an intern with the New York market algorithms research team.

On Fixed-Price Marketing for Goods with Positive Network ExternalitiesThis paper presents an approximation algorithm for marketing “networked goods” and services that exhibit positive network externalities - for example, is the buyer's value for the goods or service influenced positively by other buyers owning the goods or using the service? Such positive network externalities arise in many products like operating systems or smartphone services. While most of previous research is concerned with influence maximization, this paper attempts to identify a revenue maximizing marketing strategy for such networked goods, as follows: The seller selects a set (S) of buyers and gives them the goods for free, then sets a fixed per-unit price (p), at which other consumers can buy the item. The strategy is consistent with practice and is easy to implement. The authors use ideas from non-negative submodular maximization to find the optimal revenue maximizing fixed-price marketing strategy.

The AND-OR game: Equilibrium CharacterizationYishay Mansour, former Visiting Faculty in Google New York, presented the results; he first argued that the existence and uniqueness of market equilibria is only known for markets with divisible goods and concave or convex utilities. Then he described a simple market AND-OR game for divisible goods. To my surprise, he showed a class of mixed strategies are basically the unique set of randomized equilibria for this market (up to minor changes in the outcome). At the end, Yishay challenged the audience to give such characterization for more general markets with indivisible goods.

Kamal Jain of Ebay Research gave an interesting talk about mechanism design problems, inspired by application in companies like Ebay and Google. In one part, Kamal proposed "coopetitive ad auctions" for settings in which the auctioneer runs an auction among buyers who may cooperate with some advertisers, and at the same time compete with others for sealing advertising slots. He gave context around "product ads"; for example, a retailer like Best Buy may cooperate with a manufacturer like HP to put out a product ad for an HP computer sold at Best Buy. Kamal argued that if the cooperation is not an explicit part of the auction, an advertiser may implicitly end up competing with itself, thus decreasing the social welfare. By making the cooperation an explicit part of the auction, he was able to design a mechanism with better social welfare and revenue properties, compared to both first-price and second-price auctions. Kamal also discussed optimal mechanisms for intermediaries, and “surplus auctions” to avoid cyclic bidding behavior resulted from running naive variants of first-price auctions in repeated settings.

David Parkes of Harvard University discussed techniques to combine mechanism design with machine learning or heuristic search algorithms. At one point David discussed how to implement a branch-and-bound search algorithm in a way that results in a "monotone" allocation rule, so that if we implement a VCG-type allocation and pricing rule based on this allocation algorithm, the resulting mechanism becomes truthful. David also presented ways to compute a set of prices for any allocation, respecting incentive compatibility constraints as much as possible. Both of these topics appeared in ACM EC 2012 papers that he had co-authored.

At the business meeting, there was a proposal to change the title of the conference from “workshop” to “conference” or “symposium” to reflect its fully peer-reviewed and archival nature, keeping the same acronym of WINE. (Changing the title to “Symposium on the Web, Internet, and Network Economics” was rejected: SWINE!) WINE 2013 will be held at Harvard University in Boston, MA, and we look forward to reconnecting with fellow researchers in the field and continuing to nurture new developments and research topics.

While millions of people eagerly await Christmas Day, Santa and his elves are keeping busy at the North Pole. They’re preparing presents, tuning up the sleigh, feeding the reindeer and, of course, checking the list (twice!) before they take flight on their trip around the world.

While we’ve been tracking Santa since 2004 with Google Earth, this year a team of dedicated Google Maps engineers built a new route algorithm to chart Santa’s journey around the world on Christmas Eve. On his sleigh, arguably the fastest airborne vehicle in the world, Santa whips from city to city delivering presents to millions of homes. You’ll be able to follow him on Google Maps and Google Earth, and get his stats starting at 2:00 a.m. PST Christmas Eve at google.com/santatracker.

Simulating Santa's path across the world—see it live Dec 24

In addition, with some help from developer elves, we’ve built a few other tools to help you track Santa from wherever you may be. Add the new Chrome extension or download the Android app to keep up with Santa from your smartphone or tablet. And to get the latest updates on his trip, follow Google Maps on Google+, Facebook and Twitter.

When something big happens in the world, the YouTube community responds. Our news partners race to get footage live on the site. On-the-spot reporters upload video directly from their smartphones to let us all know what it’s like to be there. Leaders express their outrage, and their sorrow. And our 800 million users around the world head to YouTube to better understand what just happened, from multiple perspectives. For years, YouTube has been the global living room - today’s it’s becoming a global newsroom.2012 was a year in which one of the most respected voices in reporting, The Associated Press, hit one billion views on YouTube - a milestone only reached by a few dozen channels in YouTube history, and shared this year by one of the newest voices in reporting, Phil De Franco. It was a year in which one of the world's most exciting stories on Earth came in the form of a four frames-per- second video from Mars.

It was a year in which The Weather Channel live-streamed its coverage of Hurricane Sandy for more than 70 hours, to millions of people who would have struggled to get the news any other way.And it was a year in which people from more than 200 countries tuned in to youtube.com/politics to watch the US Presidential Elections.We’re proud of our news partners, and the work they do to bring the events of the world to their growing audiences around the world. Here’s our recap of 2012, which we put together with the help of Nieman Journalism Lab and Storyful. As we head into the new year, subscribe to the new youtube.com/news channel to stay on top of the biggest news stories of 2013.

At the end of the third quarter in 2012, roughly 25% of adults in Spain were out of work. More than half of adults under 24 years old are unemployed. Recent graduates and young adults preparing to enter the workforce face the toughest job market in decades.

The Internet presents an opportunity for growth and economic development. According to recent research, more than 100,000 jobs in Spain originate from the Internet and it directly contributes to the GDP with 26.7 billion euros (2.5%). That impact that could triple by 2015 under the right conditions.

One of those conditions is making high-quality education accessible, echoed by a recent OECD report on the youth labor market in Spain. This is no easy task. University degrees are in high demand, straining the reach of our existing institutions.

The web has become a way for learners to develop new skills when traditional institutions aren’t an option. Recent courses on platforms like Udacity, Coursera and edX have seen hundreds of thousands of students enroll and participate in courses taught by prestigious professors and lecturers.

Google is partnering with numerous organizations and universities in Spain to organize UniMOOC, an online course intended to educate citizens in Spain and the rest of the Spanish-speaking world about entrepreneurship. It was built with Course Builder, Google’s new open source toolkit for constructing online courses.

To date nearly 10,000 students have registered for the course, over two-thirds of them from Spain and one-third from 93 countries. It recently won an award for the “Most innovative project” in 2012 from the newspaper El Mundo.

Spain’s situation is not entirely unique in Europe. Policymakers across the continent are asking themselves how best to create economic opportunity for their citizens, and how to ensure that their best and brightest students are on a path toward financial success. Our hope is that the people taking this course will be more empowered with the right skills and tools to start their own businesses that can create jobs. They will push not only Spain, but Europe and the rest of the world towards economic recovery and growth.

With the big day right around the corner, activity in the North Pole is hitting a fever pitch. Yet, Santa will always make time to send a personalized holiday phone calls from Santa to your friends and family via his personal Google Voice line (aka Send a Call from Santa).

To send a message, find the Call Center in Santa’s Village. You will be prompted to answer a few fun questions, then Google Voice will do the rest! The system will create a tailored phone call from Santa himself, and send it to whomever you wish.

With the big day right around the corner, activity in the North Pole is hitting a fever pitch. Yet, Santa will always make time to send a personalized holiday phone calls from Santa to your friends and family via his personal Google Voice line (aka Send a Call from Santa).

To send a message, find the Call Center in Santa’s Village. You will be prompted to answer a few fun questions, then Google Voice will do the rest! The system will create a tailored phone call from Santa himself, and send it to whomever you wish.

And don’t forget: If you want to keep up with Santa as he travels around the globe delivering presents on Christmas Eve, you can track his journey on Google Maps’s Santa Tracker.

On Christmas Eve, as Santa makes his way across the world, you can follow his progress and keep tabs on how many presents he’s delivered with the Google Maps’s Santa Tracker. And this year Santa’s developer elves went a bit further. They created a Chrome extension that enables you to simultaneously browse the web on your Chrome Browser and follow Santa along his route. Simply install the Santa Tracker Chrome extension from the Chrome Web Store.

Before Santa takes off on Christmas Eve, you can also use the extension to follow the countdown to his departure, play around with his blimp, elf bus, and write messages on a frosty browser window.

While everyone in Santa’s Village is busy gearing up for the big day, they always make time for visitors. You can meet some elves and ask Santa to make a personal phone call to a friend or your family.

With the big day right around the corner, activity in the North Pole is hitting a fever pitch. Yet, Santa will always make time to send a personalized holiday phone calls from Santa to your friends and family via his personal Google Voice line (aka Send a Call from Santa).

To send a message, find the Call Center in Santa’s Village. You will be prompted to answer a few fun questions, then Google Voice will do the rest! The system will create a tailored phone call from Santa himself, and send it to whomever you wish.

While millions of people eagerly await Christmas Day, Santa and his elves are keeping busy at the North Pole. They’re preparing presents, tuning up the sleigh, feeding the reindeer and, of course, checking the list (twice!) before they take flight on their trip around the world.

While we’ve been tracking Santa since 2004 with Google Earth, this year a team of dedicated Google Maps engineers built a new route algorithm to chart Santa’s journey around the world on Christmas Eve. On his sleigh, arguably the fastest airborne vehicle in the world, Santa whips from city to city delivering presents to millions of homes. You’ll be able to follow him on Google Maps and Google Earth, and get his stats starting at 2:00 a.m. PST Christmas Eve at google.com/santatracker.

Simulating Santa's path across the world—see it live Dec 24

In addition, with some help from developer elves, we’ve built a few other tools to help you track Santa from wherever you may be. Add the new Chrome extension or download the Android app to keep up with Santa from your smartphone or tablet. And to get the latest updates on his trip, follow Google Maps on Google+, Facebook and Twitter.

Posted by +Malte Ubl, Software EngineerBlogs are a great way to spark a conversation, and today we’re giving you a new way to grab someone’s attention: Google+ mentions in Blogger. Now you can add a link to a Google+ profile or page when you want to mention someone in a post. If you then share your post from Blogger to Google+, we make it easier to notify your mentions by including them in the sharebox. To mention someone, just type “+” before their name while you’re using the Blogger post editor.

The profile or page will show up as a link in your published post. Hovering over will show a card with more info and an ‘Add to circles’ button. Clicking the link takes you straight to the Google+ profile or page.So, whether you want to credit a co-author (thanks+Gregory Fair!), ask a question, or just kick off a dialogue, connect your blog to Google+ and try mentioning someone in your next post!